Dubious Morality
by knives4cash
Summary: What tangled webs we weave.


Husk57 is one of five winners in the Spring 2016 contest over on rwby dot deviantart dot com, so I each winner gets a one-shot from me. Congratulations, husk, and my apologies for the college-related delays!

* * *

Jaune considered himself to be a pretty suave guy, and he felt he could hold his own in the big, bad world. However, at Beacon things were just a little bit different from what he was expecting. Sure, it was a school. Sure, it was training. But, it was the treatment that started to bug him, just a little, itsy, bitsy bit. He normally didn't get ticked about small things like his relationships being built on a foundation of lies and deception, but that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was starting to look like each coin had been minted with a... thorn to stick into his... side.

He wasn't the greatest when it came to hyperbole. He didn't know that wasn't a hyperbole either.

It started small. The little things from the closest people.

Pyrrha noticed pretty quickly that his form was atrocious, like he'd never swung a sword in his life. The fact that this was true was irrelevant, she never should have asked him. You just don't ask a gentleman how often he swings his sword. While he took offence, he played it off initially.

Nora noticed that he had absolutely no stamina. She asked him if he'd ever gone hunting before, as they were running laps in the gym, and he was kind of dying while she was doing circles around him. What puzzled her even more was that Peach had called for a warm up of two-hundred laps, and Jaune was already caving in with the fifth lap. Jaune could only explain that he had already run a thousand in the morning before the sun came up so many times before she offered to accompany him.

Ren noticed that he had no taste for survival food like the bark off of the Awfulus Maximus tree or the guts of the Uglius Disgustus beetle. Jaune, in all his gall, even turned down the roasted, barbed wings of the Grimm Cockroach, one of the rarest delicacies in the survival lifestyle! Ren asked him if he had ever been outside of his house. And what made it even more stupid was that it was Ren's turn to cook breakfast, so that's what he decided everyone would just love, as he had paid out of pocket for his favorite childhood treat. Jaune still felt that that had been a totally unnecessary callout on Ren's part.

Then it began to spread. After their first quiz on the pros and cons of Fuchsia's Marshland Conquest, Jaune received a "C super minus" which he didn't even think was a thing, but apparently it was. Yang, always one to celebrate the survival of a grade, offered him the friendliest high-five one could ever dream of. Accepting her glorious invitation, Jaune immediately found himself with a dislocated shoulder, a broken arm, a shattered wrist, five eviscerated fingers, and a burst eardrum from the supersonic blast, which prompted a trip to the school ER.

As he lay in the infirmary, wrapped up like a birthday present, he was visited by his loyal teammates who did their best to see him as a victim of a barbaric superpower, though their snorts and chuckles led him to suspect that they might have found his predicament less so. Time passed, and they had to bid him farewell for the night after they realized that he was somewhat offended that they had all aced the fateful quiz.

He felt that things could not get any worse, left alone with his mangled form and lonely mind. At that very moment, in the cold and empty ward, Jaune heard the doors squeak open, and a man emerged from behind his curtain: Professor Ozpin, headmaster of the prestigious school in which Jaune Arc had masterfully infiltrated, with his cane in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

"Mister Arc," Ozpin observed with a warm smile, Scroll in one hand and coffee mug in the other. "How goes your recovery?"

"P- Professor!" Jaune hastily welcomed. "Uh, well, it's going about as well as you could expect." As Ozpin sat down on his left side, Jaune had to gulp nervously as he recalled his own father taking similar stances when it came to discipline.

"I understand, Mister Arc," the professor acknowledged with a warm smile. Getting comfy, he wondered, "What I don't understand is why you don't want to use your aura to accelerate your recovery."

"Oh," Jaune realized a little too suddenly. Stammering, he attempted to recover his composure. "I, uh, thought I'd take some time off and relax."

Despite the fact that it was only the second week of the semester, this was totally understandable given Jaune's qualifications. "Ah, I see," Ozpin nodded. He took a nice, long sip of his black, dark, abyss-level coffee and murmured, "Then we'll mail you the bill for using school resources unnecessarily."

"Wait, what?"

"So, Jaune, I have actually been meaning to talk to you," Ozpin flawlessly switched topics. "I couldn't help but notice that your form has been rather atrocious ever since you got here. You keep throwing your whole weight into each swing. For someone who graduated from Signal, I'm shocked that you managed to do so well."

"Ah, um, well," Jaune quickly quirked as he realized that his legendary suave charm was all that stood between him and Professor Ozpin deciding to kick his blonde butt out of school faster than a Grimm apologist in a-

"Mister Arc? Are you okay?" Ozpin asked in monotone before thoughtfully sipping on his coffee.

"It's a family recipe! A family heirloom! A family tradition!" he quickly synthesized, his last-second-panic prompting him to believe that he had totally clutched it.

Nodding along, Ozpin decided, "That makes sense. But what about your lack of stamina? Is that a family tradition as well? I know Professor Port can inspire a certain style of staticness, but-"

"Family genetics!" Jaune decided. "My great grandma was a sphere on wheels- feet! Yeah, it's a recessive gene. Y'know, I actually identify as a bodybuilder, so in the cosmic scale it all balances out."

Sighing, Ozpin sank into his chair and stared into the abyss of his black, eternal coffee. "But, Jaune, your grades. They're so low. In fact, they're the lowest on record in the past seven years. Not many can scrape by on C super minuses."

"My great grandpa was a vegetable," Jaune shot back with feigned offence, vividly imagining his great grandpa's horrendous diet. "I'll have you know that I'm also my family's first generation to go to an academy."

Nodding along, Ozpin realized he was going to have to do a lot of nodding. It would still be totally worth it. "Rest well, Mister Arc," he forebodingly thanked as he bid the young boy a good night.

As the doors closed for the night, and the lights went out, Jaune sat alone, wondering how he could ever live with the moral ramifications of cheating his way through life. In that moment of potential philosophical epiphany, Jaune recalled the advice of his grandfather, just before his untimely yet heroic passing.

"John..."

"Um, grandpa, it's actually Jau-"

"John, your teacher asked me to pick you up from kindergarten not because you cheated on your combat exam. They asked me to pick you up because they _caught_ you cheating, my boy! Every time you hear about a corrupt politician, or police officer, or the like getting arrested for some crime, it's not because they committed it. It's because someone found out that they were committing it!"

"So I should just do a better job of cheating?"

"Exactly, boy, my! Job! You're! Great, doing, will!"

"Grandpa?"

"Stroke, call. Ambulance, having."

And so ended the grande life of Decipapa Jaune, who bestowed upon Jaune advice that could only be described as real as it was cold. Jaune sat in his bed, pondering his future, wondering if he would ever come clean with everyone in his life or just follow his grandfather's advice. He had, in his hands that very moment, the power to change the course of his life. He thought carefully for about five seconds.

A gentle buzzing, a text notification on his scroll, alerted him. Using his good hand, he reached over to his bedside table and had a look at his social life. Lo and behold, it was Yang, sending a picture of herself and Weiss, who refused to do the duck face with Yang, followed by the caption "get btr soon!".

Seeing that Weiss was not making out with another man, Jaune decided to text back, "Is Weiss still single?"


End file.
